A Religion Read from the Ground

Norse paganism in the Viking Age has to be reconstructed almost entirely without its own writing. Neil Price's account works from burials, and the burials are extraordinarily varied: cremations and inhumations, ships buried whole with their equipment, chamber graves, wagon burials, graves with weapons and graves with tools, animals killed and placed with the dead, and in a number of cases people killed and placed with them. That variety is itself evidence. A tradition with a single doctrine about the fate of the dead does not produce so many different treatments of a body, so the archaeology points to a religion of local practice and household obligation rather than of unified teaching.

Other categories of evidence fill in around it. Place names record which gods were worshipped where, and the distribution is uneven in ways that mattered. Runestones record memorials and, towards the end of the period, conversions. Amulets, small figures and the remains of feasting halls indicate where ritual happened. Boat graves and the deposition of weapons in water continue older northern habits, and the great halls excavated at sites such as Lejre and Uppakra show that feasting and ritual were functions of the same building. What none of this supplies is a Viking Age statement of what any of it meant, and the atlas keeps that gap visible rather than filling it from later texts.